


Cold Comforts (The Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine Remix)

by fireflysglow_archivist



Category: Firefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-03
Updated: 2006-02-03
Packaged: 2019-04-29 09:26:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14469705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflysglow_archivist/pseuds/fireflysglow_archivist
Summary: The daily medication ritual: Simon remembers.





	Cold Comforts (The Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Firefly’s Glow](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Firefly%27s_Glow), and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2018. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Firefly's Glow collection profile](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/fireflysglow/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** Thanks to Distraction and k for beta reading. Chinese is from zhongwen.com. Written for Remix/Redux III: Reloaded, based on a story by Sullen Siren.

  
Author's notes: Thanks to Distraction and k for beta reading. Chinese is from zhongwen.com. Written for Remix/Redux III: Reloaded, based on a story by Sullen Siren.  


* * *

Cold Comforts (The Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine Remix)

## Cold Comforts (The Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine Remix)

He misses the sun. He feels like a wilting flower, a houseplant that everyone has forgotten to water. When he was a boy, he had spider plants in his room. They were all but unkillable: their tendrils would turn beige and crinkle, but one dose of water brought back their green stripes. Two doses, and he was searching the house for bowls in which to nurture infant plants. By the time River accidentally-on-purpose poisoned most of them to death with paint thinner, they'd taken over so much of his room that he'd been relieved to see them vanquished. 

River sits on an infirmary bed, lost in her spider plant mind, twisting her fingers and occasionally muttering things about the speed of light. "Defies the laws of science," she says when he comes close. "You wouldn't believe." He loads the cocktail of antipsychotics into a syringe and drips the excess from the tip of the needle. It's sensible that overdoses look like venom. Too much, and his creeping houseplant sister will be turpentined for good. He laughs, but she misunderstands and stares at him in horror. Sometimes it seems like she knows everything he's thinking; sometimes it seems like she misreads him on purpose because she doesn't like what's in his head. 

"I hypothesize that Rivers cannot be divided equally without the halves turning against one another," she says, as if she were inquiring about the weather. Infant plants compete for space and sunlight, sabotage each other's encroachment. 

"This will put you back together, mei mei," he says. 

"Not all the Rivers," she says. And he knows there are girls he will never find in her again. In his mind there is a gawky seven-year-old in silk panda-bear pajamas, tiptoing as if _en pointe_. Sneaking systematically into every room and cupboard where breakables are kept, cradling each bubble of glass or china in her hands. 

"What are you doing?" he asked. His voice cracked, and his face turned crimson. 

"Naming them," she said. "They're sad because they've been locked away without being named." 

"What's that one called?" he said. 

"You can't pronounce it," she said. "It's in frog language." She put the glass frog back on its shelf and produced a porcelain sheep. "You can name this one." 

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "You do it." But she was getting fat-lipped with disappointment. Slants of daybreak were starting to come through the window, and he said, "Ri Zhao. Sunshine." 

"She likes it," River said, putting the figurine in his hands. The whooshing noise of the morning maid startled him, and to avoid dropping the fragile thing, he slipped it into the pocket of his bathrobe. He never remembered to return it to the cabinet, not even after the morning maid was fired for stealing it. 

When he left Osiris, he brought it with him. It sleeps in a quilted box lined with surgical cotton, to keep it from shattering when Serenity lurches. If River knows he has it, she has kept that knowledge to herself, although he suspects there is an unfathomable amount of knowledge that she has not shared with him. 

There's no sunshine on Serenity. Ambient lights wake them, full-spectrum to stave off the light deprivation that made scores of early interstellar settlers hang themselves from beams. Sometimes, they'll pass just the right distance from a star, and Wash will call them all to the bridge to see it burn, blinding and ethereal. But the closest thing to sunshine that Simon has is a porcelain sheep in a box, and when he takes it out, he can see all the sisters he'll never know, the ones surgically removed with a dancer's precision. 

He doesn't know what to work for to make River right, and he sees himself avoiding her because the failure is a wound that won't heal. He gravitates toward Kaylee's sunshine, and she _is_ sunshine, a smiling light in his cold. Near her, he feels less wilted. The chill of space gives her energy as it takes his away, and she shares what she has, cycles it back into him. And she likes him, so much that he knows that he doesn't deserve her. So much that he puts the lack of desire out of his mind and lets her want him. There ought to be satisfaction in being wanted. She's not the only one who doesn't understand why he shies away, though he is beginning to: she thinks she isn't good for anything but what she does. She looks up to him from child-feet, and he has never wanted that from a lover, maybe because he has always longed to see that admiration from River. 

He doesn't need another little sister. Especially now, when she's the only thing he has. 

River apologized to Kaylee the other day: stalked up to her with grave importance and expressed her sincerest preventative measures. Kaylee looked as if she'd been dimmed. "Never mind," River said. "She experiments because she can only see Now. Sometimes the resulting futures are awkward." 

He raises the syringe and promises this will only hurt for a second, then slides the needle into the arm of his poor vivisected sister. As the drug takes effect, she smiles like she has thought of a new way to kill him instantly. "How do you feel, mei mei?" he says. He asks every day, on tiptoe, like he is stuck in a nightmare where he is appearing in one of River's childhood dance recitals. _Sur les pointes_ , in those sugarplum costumes that made her scratch under her arms. He hated that all the girls looked the same in their shoes and tiaras, that even a girl like River could disappear in a herd of choreographed glitter. 

"Precise venom helps," she says. 

It doesn't seem to be working. She builds up resistances, and he is back to mixing and testing, molding his frustration into tight white spheres that he doubts he can hide from her. She grins at him and says, "Thank you, Simon," and he wants to smash vials on the floor, overturn drawers so disarrays of instruments glint in the blue infirmary light. He wishes he could hate her for being an unsolvable puzzle, but instead, he loves her so much that he feels incapable of loving anything else. 

"You're sun-kissed, aren't you?" River says. "Kissed all over." She twists the drawstrings at the neck of her shirt and glares at him like a jealous lover. He wonders if it is really that simple. She has always stated things in such complicated ways that it's hard to see the teenage girl in her. But there has to be some part of her that's dizzy with hormones and hope. Something must be right on schedule, neither accelerated by her brilliance nor hindered with scalpel precision. 

"Mei mei," he says, "Am I... hoarding too much of the sunshine?" 

"You can't help it," she says. "It's the way of the 'verse. Boys and girls, two by two." 

"It doesn't have to be," he says. "I can-- I can end it if you want me to." He longs to hear something as simple as a yes from her, not because it would give him permission to halt a flirtation he's wary of continuing anyway, but because he wouldn't have to parse her feelings. He imagines himself dissecting her, and what he is removing is an ovary, bleeding and flushed with desire. 

"Star-watching is only faraway suns," she says. "You're close, so close, you reach your blue fingers out like they'll stop burning. But the smoke isn't coming from your hands." 

Kaylee comes in, grinning and oil-stained. Simon misses the disinfectant curtains at the doors of public hospitals in the Core; his clean infirmary seems streaked with grease. River hops down from the exam bed and sashays toward the door. He is not ready for this. "Don't!" he says. "River--" But she's left him alone with the puzzled expression on his face. 

He iterates apologies in his mind: more explanations than Kaylee will give him time for. There are spider plants and tiny porcelain livestock mixed up in telling her it's not going to work out. Some of River's madness in him. Some of River is here.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title:   **Cold Comforts (The Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine Remix)**   
Author:   **Mosca**   [website]   
Details:   **Standalone**  |  **PG-13**  |  **gen**  |  **7k**  |  **02/03/06**   
Characters:  Simon, River   
Summary:  The daily medication ritual: Simon remembers.   
Notes:  Thanks to Distraction and k for beta reading. Chinese is from zhongwen.com. Written for Remix/Redux III: Reloaded, based on a story by Sullen Siren.   
  



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